Eugenics … death of the defenceless

The legacy of Darwin’s cousin Galton

Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years
than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of
eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate ‘defective’
unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for
research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory
of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?

Francis Galton

Photos Darwin by TFE Graphics, Hitler and Galton by Wikipedia.org

Francis Galton (featured on right in photo montage, right) was born into a Quaker
family in Birmingham, England, in 1822. A grandson of Erasmus Darwin on his mother’s
side and so a cousin of Charles Darwin (pictured above left), he shared the Darwinian
agnosticism and antagonism to Christianity for most of his adult life.

As a child, he had learned the alphabet by 18 months, was reading by age 2½,
memorizing poetry by five, and discussing the Iliad at six.1 In 1840, he began studies at Cambridge University
in medicine and then in mathematics, but, due to a nervous breakdown, succeeded
in gaining only a modest B.A. degree, in January 1844.2
When his father died that same year, he inherited such a fortune that he never again
needed to work for a living.

This gave the wealthy young Galton free time not only for ‘amusement’,
but also to dabble in a number of fields, including exploration of large areas of
South West Africa, his reports of which gained him membership of the Royal Geographic
Society in 1853, and three years later of the Royal Society. In that year, Galton
married Louisa Butler, whose father had been Headmaster at Harrow School.

As an amateur scientist of boundless curiosity and energy, he went on to write some
14 books and over 200 papers.3 His inventions
included the ‘silent’ dog whistle, a teletype printer; and various instruments
and techniques for measuring human intelligence and body parts; and he invented
the weather map and discovered the existence of anticyclones.

Interaction with Charles Darwin

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 was undoubtedly
a turning point in Galton’s life. In 1869 he wrote to Darwin, ‘[T]he
appearance of your Origin of Species formed a real crisis in my life; your
book drove away the constraint of my old superstition [i.e. religious arguments
based on design] as if it had been a nightmare and was the first to give me freedom
of thought.’4

Pseudoscientific illustration of alleged evolution of human ‘races’.

An allegedly ‘scientific’ illustration from 1868 showing that blacks
were less evolved than whites by suggesting similarities with a chimpanzee.

Even the famous evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould commented that the chimpanzee skull
is falsely enlarged and the ‘negro’ jaw falsely extended to suggest
that ‘negros’ rank even lower than apes. This demonstration was not
from racist or ‘fringe’ literature but from one of the leading scientific
textbooks of its time. Today’s militant evolutionists like to conveniently
evade the social implications of their ideas, but history demonstrates otherwise.

Galton ‘was among the first to recognize the implications for mankind of Darwin’s
theory of evolution.’5 He believed
that talent, character, intellect, etc. were all inherited from one’s ancestors,
as was also any lack of these qualities. Thus the poor were not hapless victims
of their circumstances, but were paupers because they were biologically inferior.
This was contrary to the prevailing scientific view that all such qualities were
due to environment, i.e. how and where a person was brought up.6
Galton believed that humans, like animals, could and should be selectively bred.
In 1883, he coined the term ‘eugenics’ [Greek: εύ (eu)
meaning ‘well’ and γένος (genos) meaning
‘kind’ or ‘offspring’] for the study of ways of improving
the physical and mental characteristics of the human race.

Galton’s views left no room for the existence of a human soul, the grace of
God in the human heart, human freedom to choose to be different, or even for the
dignity of the individual. In his first published article on this subject, in 1865,7 ‘He denied … that man’s
rational faculties are a gift to him from God; he denied that mankind has been cursed
with sinfulness since the day of Adam and Eve’; and he viewed religious sentiments
as ‘nothing more than evolutionary devices to insure the survival of the human
species.’8

Concerning the sense of original sin, he wrote that ‘[this] would show, according
to my theory, not that man was fallen from a high estate, but that he was rapidly
rising from a low one … and that after myriads of years of barbarism, our
race has but very recently grown to be civilized and religious.’9

In Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton enlarged on all these ideas and proposed that
a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would
eventually produce a gifted race. When Charles Darwin read this book, he wrote to
Galton, ‘You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense for I have always
maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in
zeal and hard work … .’5 Galton’s ideas undoubtedly helped him
extend his evolution theory to man. Darwin did not mention Galton in his Origin,
but referred to him no less than 11 times in his Descent of Man (1871).

Three International Eugenics Congresses were held in 1912, 1921 and 1932, with eugenics
activists attending from Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, India,
Japan, Mauritius, Kenya and South Africa. Notables who supported the ideas pre–World
War II included Winston Churchill, economist John Maynard Keynes, science fiction
writer H.G. Wells10 and US Presidents Theodore
Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. Galton received the Huxley Medal from the Anthropological
Institute in 1901, the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society in 1902, the Darwin–Wallace
Medal from the Linnean Society in 1908, and honorary degrees from Cambridge and
Oxford Universities; he was knighted in 1909. Despite these ‘honours’,
in life Galton was not his own best advocate for his theories. He had many long-lasting
bouts of illness, and notwithstanding his and his wife’s good intellectual
pedigrees, they produced no children of their own to carry on his name and heritage.
After his death in 1911, his will provided for the funding of a Chair of Eugenics
and the Galton Eugenics Laboratory at the University of London.

Eugenics in action

The concept of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race
may seem admirable at first glance. However, historically the method of achieving
it has involved not just increasing the birthrate of the ‘fit’ by selected
parenthood (‘positive eugenics’), but also reducing the birthrate of
those people thought to impair such improvement, the ‘unfit’ (‘negative
eugenics’).11

For example, by 1913, one-third (and from the 1920s on, more than half)12 of the US States had laws allowing for the compulsory
sterilization of those held in custody who were deemed to be ‘unfit’.
This resulted in the forced sterilization of some 70,000 victims, including criminals,
the mentally retarded, drug addicts, paupers, the blind, the deaf, and people with
epilepsy, TB or syphilis. Over 8,000 procedures were done at the one city of Lynchburg,
Virginia,13 and isolated instances continued
into the 1970s.14,15

About 60,000 Swedish citizens were similarly treated between 1935 and 1976, and
there were similar practices in Norway and Canada.16

In Germany in 1933, Hitler’s government ordered the compulsory sterilization
of all German citizens with ‘undesirable’ handicaps, not just those
held in custody or in institutions. This was to prevent ‘contamination’
of Hitler’s ‘superior German race’ through intermarriage.

Then from 1938 to 1945, this surgical treatment of such ‘useless eaters’
was superseded by a more comprehensive solution—the eager genocide, by Hitler’s
Nazis, of over 11 million people considered to be subhuman or unworthy of life,
as is authenticated and documented by the Nuremberg Trials records. Those killed
included Jews, evangelical Christians,17
blacks, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, amputees and mental patients.

This was nothing other than rampant Darwinism—the elimination of millions
of human beings branded ‘unfit/inferior’ by, and for the benefit of,
those who regarded themselves as being ‘fit/superior’.

The core idea of Darwinism is selection.18
The Nazis believed that they must direct the process of selection to advance the
German race.19 Galton’s naïve vision
of a ‘eugenics utopia’ had mutated into the Nazi nightmare of murderous
ethnic cleansing.

Sadly, ideas of racial superiority and eugenics did not die with Hitler’s
regime. David Duke, America’s infamous anti-black and anti-Jew racist, developed
his views from reading the eugenicist writings of Galton, H.G.
Wells, Sir Arthur Keith and others, as well
as the early writings of modern sociobiologists such as Harvard’s E.O. Wilson.20

Eugenics in the 21st century.

Following World War II, eugenics became a ‘dirty word’. Eugenicists
now called themselves ‘population scientists’, ‘human geneticists’,
‘family politicians’, etc. Journals were renamed. Annals of Eugenics
became Annals of Human Genetics, and Eugenics Quarterly became the Journal of Social
Biology.21 However today, some
60 years after the Holocaust, the murderous concept that Galton’s eugenics
spawned is once again alive and flourishing, and wearing a lab-coat of medical respectability.

Doctors now routinely destroy humans, who were created in God’s image (Genesis
1:26), by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, as well as in fetal/embryonic stem-cell
research.

A. Abortion

According to the UK’s Daily Mail, ‘women are increasingly eliminating
their unborn children because of non life-threatening deformities such as deformed
feet or cleft lips and palates’, and ‘more Down’s Syndrome babies
are now killed than are allowed to be born.’22
Dr Jacqueline Laing of London’s Metropolitan University commented, ‘These
figures are symptomatic of a eugenic trend of the consumerist society hell-bent
on obliterating deformity.’ ‘This is straightforward eugenics,’
said UK’s Life Trustee, Nuala Scarisbrick. ‘The message is being sent
out to disabled people that they should not have been born. It is appalling and
abhorrent.’22

Globally, there are an estimated 50 million abortions each year. That’s one
abortion for every three live births, so any child in the womb, on average, worldwide,
has a one in four chance of being deliberately killed.23

B. Infanticide

China is famous for its coercive one-child-per-family policy. In practice, most
families want a boy, so if a girl is born, she can be at risk. Sometimes the same
grisly principle is followed, but before birth. In India, it’s common to find
out the sex of the baby, and a vast majority of abortions are of girl babies. It
makes the feminist support of abortion distressingly ironic.

And disabled babies are at risk as well. ‘Ethicist’ Peter Singer has
advocated legalization of infanticide to a certain age. He writes: ‘[K]illing
a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is
not wrong at all.’24

C. Euthanasia

In May 2001, Holland became the first country to legalize euthanasia, with the law
coming into effect from January 2002. Euthanasia was tolerated in Belgium until
May 2002, when it was legalized. It is tolerated in Switzerland, Norway and Columbia.23

Eugenics and the Scopes Monkey Trial1

Photo Bryan College

Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan

The textbook from which Scopes taught evolution, A Civic Biology by George
Hunter,2 and its companion lab book3 were blatantly eugenic
and offensively racist. Hunter divided humanity into five races and ranked them
according to how high each had reached on the evolutionary scale, from ‘the
Ethiopian or negro type’ to ‘the highest type of all, the Caucasians,
represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America’.4A Civic Biology asserted that crime and immorality are inherited and run
in families, and said that ‘these families have become parasitic on society.
… If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent
them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of
separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage
and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.’4

This
is the book that Darwinists of the day insisted that Scopes had a right to teach!

All this is documented by Dr David Menton in the DVD
Inherently Wind: a Hollywood History of the Scopes Trial (right).

References and notes

The 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee, USA, of high-school teacher John T. Scopes,
charged with violating state law by teaching the theory of evolution.

Judgment
at Nuremberg

Perhaps the most frequently asked question concerning the eugenics-inspired genocide
of the Holocaust is: ‘How could it have happened?’ In the 1961 MGM film
Judgment at Nuremberg, about the trial of four Nazi war criminals, judges
who had enforced Nazi decrees,1 one of the defendants (Judge Ernst Janning,
played by Burt Lancaster) cries out to Chief Judge Dan Haywood (played by Spencer
Tracy): ‘Those people—those millions of people—I never knew it
would come to that. You must believe it!’ Haywood’s response was eloquent:
‘It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be
innocent.’

Likewise today, eugenic killing of innocent preborn babies because they are thought
to be less than perfect began the first time a doctor consented to kill a handicapped
child in the womb. The rest is history.

Based on the third Nuremberg Trial (1947), also called the ‘Judges’
Trial’ because it tried Nazi judges and prosecutors for imposing the Nazi
‘racial purity’ programme through the eugenic and racial laws. There
were a total of 13 Nuremberg Trials.

The photograph (above right) comes from the first Nuremberg Trial (1945–6),
the most famous and significant of them because it tried the main German leaders.Front row (left-to-right): Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von
Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel;Back row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel.
(Courtesy Wikipedia)

Conclusion

Not all evolutionists are murderers, of course, and Francis Galton may never have
conceived that his theories would lead to the killing of so many millions of people,
let alone the onslaught on defenceless unborn babies. However, such action is totally
consistent with evolutionary teaching, namely the survival of the fittest by the
elimination of the weakest. Deeds are the outcome of beliefs. As Jesus said: ‘A
bad tree bears bad fruit’; it ‘cannot bear good fruit’ (Matthew
7:17–18).

Contrary to the deadly philosophy of eugenics, every human person has eternal value
in God’s sight and has been created ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis
1:26–27). God also explicitly forbade murder (Exodus
20:13), or intentional killing of innocent humans. Indeed, God so loved
humanity that He sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to die on the Cross to save
us from sin (John
3:16–17), and to transform us into the image of His Son when we believe
on Him (Romans
8:29;
2 Corinthians 3:18). In Jesus, the Second
Person of the Trinity took on human nature
(Hebrews
2:14), becoming the Last Adam (1
Corinthians 15:45), thus becoming the (kinsman-) Redeemer (Isaiah
59:20) of the race of the first man, Adam.

Related Media

References and notes

Forrest, D.W., Francis Galton: The life and work of a Victorian
genius, Paul Elek, London, UK, p. 25, 1974. Return to text

Subjects included twins, blood transfusions, criminality, travel
in undeveloped countries, meteorology, correlational calculus, anthropometry (measurement
of the human body), and fingerprints as a means of identity—first used by
Scotland Yard in 1901 and now throughout the world. Return to text

The last sentence of Galton’s autobiography reads: ‘Natural
Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on
bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and
those only of the best stock.’ (Ref. 9, p. 323.) Return to text

In 1931, Vermont became the 31st US State to enact a sterilization
law (not repealed until 1973). Source: Washington Post, 8 August 1999,
p. A21. Return to text

Black, E., War against the weak: Eugenics and America’s
campaign to create a master race, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York/London,
2003; see review by Sarfati, J.,
Creation27(2):49, 2005. Return to text

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